“Thinking is a listening that discerns”
The Onto-Theological Metaphor: Poetic and Speculative Discourse, between Wallace Stevens and Paul Ricoeur
Abstract
This article proposes a parallel between Paul Ricœur’s living metaphor and the metaphorical angelology of Wallace Stevens’s poetry, based on the possibility of qualifying both as bearers of an onto-theological value, identified as constitutive in the characterization of being underlying the metaphor. This ontological-metaphorical disposition is brought to light by Ricœur through the dialectic between speculative-philosophical discourse and poetic discourse—between philosophy and the poetic art understood in the Aristotelian sense—argued especially in two studies of The Rule of Metaphor. Such a dialectic demonstrates, in fact, the necessary horizon within which the onto-theological metaphor may reveal itself, allowing one to glimpse the inevitable openness toward a truth-bearing knowledge that always involves the other and that, in certain respects, even overturns the Heideggerian critique of onto-theology.
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